Winners and Losers

Susan Estrich on Jun 5, 2025

That's what tax bills are all about -- who pays more and who pays less, who gets the benefits and who ends up holding the bag.

President Donald Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill" should come as a surprise to no one. It's a bonanza for the rich. The research is incontrovertible.

The U.S. Treasury Department estimates that nearly 60% of the tax cuts, or about $2.5 trillion, would go to the top 10% of taxpayers over the next decade.

A Yale Budget Lab analysis found that the top 1% of earners would receive an average tax cut of close to $70,000 in the first year after enactment.

A Penn Wharton Budget Model analysis on the impacts of the Republican tax bill found that the bottom 80% of income earners would get 29% of the total value of proposed tax cuts in 2026, while the top 10% would get 56% of the value.

However you choose to dissect it, the rich are the winners, and the richer you are, the more you win. It's the Let the Rich Get Richer While We Mortgage the Future Tax Bill.

Who in the world would be for it? The answer should be, if we were all smartly voting based on our pocketbooks, the top 10% -- who are getting nearly 60% of the benefits. And that should simply not be enough.

Is there really a majority in this country for rewarding the wealthiest Americans at the expense of public health, education, clean water and energy, national parks, and affordable housing, just to start the list of what's getting cut already, along with the mortgage this puts on the future?

A budget is an outline of your goals and priorities, a statement of your principles. What are the principles behind this budget? Reward the rich, and mortgage your children's future. Tax cuts for the Trumps, and as for everyone else, as Sen. Joni Ernst so aptly recognized, they just die. This is how Republicans talk about cutting Medicaid. And of course, they are right. Take away access to health insurance and you take away access to health care. And people die. The front lines aren't pretty today. Imagine how much worse they will be once they start throwing people off Medicaid.

Something is fundamentally wrong with our politics. In the last election, the Republicans managed to convince millions of Americans that the GOP was the party of working-class average Americans, as opposed to the woke/DEI elites that they populated the opposition with. It worked as a strategy but has had precious little impact on the policy side. The president has tried to sell his tariffs as protecting American workers, but the analysis to date suggests that those working families are the ones that stand to pay higher prices. Tariffs are a regressive form of taxation.

But this is a matter of politics, not economics, or even good social policy. Elon Musk may have turned on the president, calling the big, beautiful bill of his ex-BFF an "abomination," but the rest of the Republican Party is still afraid of what an even Musk-less Trump may do to them. A primary opponent? This is the advantage of being someone known as stopping at nothing when it comes to avenging those who have wronged him. Trump is scary because he has no limits when the issue is loyalty.

The emperor has no clothes. But the people around him don't dare tell him. They'd rather confuse the issues than address the truth. And that is why we are stuck.

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To find out more about Susan Estrich and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.